On May 10, 1869, at Promontory Summit, Utah, Leland Stanford drove the ceremonial golden spike into a railroad tie, an event marking the completion of the nation's first transcontinental railroad and the culmination of the dream of not only Stanford himself, but many other Californians. Clearly the building of the railroad tracks across the forbidding Sierra mountain range represented one of the nineteenth century's grandest engineering feats. The working conditions had been often horrific, however, with scores of workers being killed or maimed. As would so often happen in California history, the dirty work was performed by immigrants, primarily, but not exclusively, Chinese. Besides the linkage to the East, in 1874, the Southern Pacific completed a railroad line connecting Los Angeles and the Bay Area for the first time. When one has read of the difficulties of intrastate travel in the U.S. Sanitary Commission letters, one can appreciate the importance of the latter event as well. Californians could ship crops, visit kin, and conduct business much more easily.

The transcontinental railroad would make possible a trip to California undertaken by Emerson in 1871. Enchanted by a landscape that King had schooled him to appreciate in advance of his actual visit – King had sent him Carleton Watkins's photographs of the Big Trees in 1862, for example – Emerson met John Muir in Yosemite. Muir had envisioned a scenario whereby Emerson would camp out with him, but that undertaking was deemed by his family to be too much for the aging Emerson. Disappointed that the great man stayed only briefly, Muir was nonetheless gratified that Emerson was, as he had hoped, the perfect audience to appreciate the scenic splendors: “He seemed as serene as a sequoia, his head in the empyrean.” When Emerson returned to Massachusetts, he went at once to see King's close friend James T. Fields. Writing two decades later, Fields's widow reported that Emerson told the editor that “we must not visit San Francisco too young or we shall never wish to come away.” As for Yosemite, “it was a place full of marvel and glory to him.” Muir and Emerson kept in touch until the older man died, and then Muir made a pilgrimage to his grave.